Hello, I'll make this quick. I'm 26 and looking for a career change. Though I never completed my degree in college I was there for 3 years, during which I worked for geek squad and did random freelance computer work to pay my bills. I've always enjoyed computers and never been afraid of math. For the past 3 years I've worked for a major national insurance company training their adjuster on the computer software they would be using as well as working to support all of our companies different web based programs and databases (ie battling with SQL 80% of the time.) I know that web development is completely different from anything I've done and really only gave those points to prove I have interest in setting around working on computer all day long and actually kind of enjoy it. I have enough money to pay the bills for the next 6 months saved up as well as some extra to put toward some sort of trade school. So my question would be, what advice would you give to someone who is new to coding, looking for a career in web development, unfortunately no college degree, and plenty of money with quite a bit of time to spend on and education. If you hung in there for the whole thing I really appreciate it and thank you a ton.

10-09-2013, 02:33 AM

TxCodeMonkey

/bump? lol Starting to scare me. There have been so many views yet no one seems to have an answer. I seem to be well on my way as far as learning the basic fundamentals after joining TeamTreehouse and reading tons of blogs and downloading useful apps both specifically for Web Dev Learning as well as Knowledge retention, However, I'm still up on some real world input although I'm starting to learn in this field that you seem to get out of it what you put in. Thanks again in advance!

10-10-2013, 01:41 PM

Justos

Sorry nobody has answered you, but il take a crack at it.

The best advice for someone in your shoes is to just get dirty and code. Start with learning HTML, understand the markup for how a site is built, then start messing with CSS to style the site with colors,fonts,positioning,animations,etc.

Once you're comfortable enough with these two, move onto javascript, which makes pretty pages more functional. This is probably the more difficult part of web development, (as it involves a lot more) and there are definitely a lot of other ways to learn to do the same thing. There are other languages, but these 3 are the best first steps.

some tips:

Every websites source code is viewable! If you see something and wonder, how was that done? Just inspect it in any modern browser.

Don't try to learn everything and then code! Implement new features as you learn, so you can solidify your learning. If you learn everything from a book then start coding, you probably wont remember everything anymore.